Don't Shoot the Messenger: Bad News for Martini Drinkers

The Wall Street Journal ^ | January 9, 2009 | Eric Felten

[1rudeboy]

Martini drinkers are conservatives. Not necessarily politically, but in temperament: They abjure fad and fashion in drink, hewing to the Platonic form of the cocktail. They would stand athwart history yelling Stop -- if yelling weren't inconsistent with the proper comportment of a Martini drinker. They dislike change. It is with some trepidation, then, that I bring what is almost certain to be received as appalling news: Noilly Prat, the dry vermouth considered by many devotees to be the only choice for a well-made Martini, is changing its U.S. formula.

"Noilly Prat is a necessary component of a dry martini," wrote the novelist and Martini connoisseur W. Somerset Maugham in 1958. He gave the French vermouth such a formidable endorsement that the company would, for years, devote full-page magazine advertisements to quoting his claim that, without Noilly Prat, "you can make a side car, a gimlet, a white lady, or a gin and bitters, but you cannot make a dry martini."

Maugham's digression into the essentiality of Noilly Prat comes from an essay in which Maugham is exploring a Hindu-inspired notion of man's fallen nature. "Man is born to sin," he writes, and "he would not be a man if he were devoid of evil." To flesh out his point, Maugham argues that "Evil is a necessary component of him just as (if I may be permitted a flippant comparison) Noilly Prat is a necessary component of a dry martini. . . ." The comparison may be flippant, but it does have a certain resonance. Just as evil is necessary to man, vermouth has come to be seen as a necessary evil in Martinis.

The question is, just how evil is the new Noilly Prat?

[DugwayDuke]

It’s not a matter of being ‘cool’. I just find that vermouth ruins the taste of the gin.